On: Japan’s New Satellite Captures an Image of Earth E...

[SiVal]

I wish there were a pair of these satellites separated by a couple thousand miles/km, so we could view these images with next-gen, hi-rez VR goggles and see the surface and cloud topography with enhanced depth.

[vlasev → SiVal]

Let's do a sanity check on this.

Cloud height is at about 60,000 feet maximum (in the tropics http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jetstream/clouds/height_max.htm). Let's be generous and say this is 20 km maximum height.

Earth's diameter is 12742 km. The clouds are about 0.15 % of this size, relatively speaking. The full images are about 11k by 11k, so we can say that 1 px is roughly 1 km. This means that the clouds will be on the scale of 20 pixels, roughly.

You know what, this might actually work.

[shpx → SiVal]

I've always wondered if https://xkcd.com/941/ actually works and if anyone has done it yet